by Ian W. Toll
These orders were carried from Halifax to the Virginia Capes by Berkeley’s flagship, the 52-gun frigate Leopard. After a passage of twelve days, in which she pressed seamen from several merchant vessels along the American coast, Leopard anchored in Lynnhaven Bay.
MONDAY, JUNE 22, DAWNED with clear skies and a gentle southwest breeze. At 7:00 a.m. Chesapeake took aboard her jolly boat and cutter. Fifteen minutes later, all hands were turned out to make sail, and the ship stood down the fairway and out for sea.
Her crew of 381 included 329 officers and seamen and 52 marines. In addition, there were several civilian passengers, including Dr. John Bullus, the newly appointed Mediterranean Navy Agent, with his wife, three children, and two servants; the wife of Marine Captain John Hall; and ten Italian musicians who had performed for some years as the Marine Band, and were being permitted to return, at their request, to Italy.
The logistical challenges of maintaining an active squadron far from American shores, combined with Jeffersonian parsimony, required the Chesapeake to ship a large quantity of provisions, stores, baggage, and spare ammunition on her passage to the Mediterranean. The frigate was doing double duty as her own storeship, and in the rush to get to sea various articles had been hastily stowed wherever a vacant corner could be found—spare lumber, casks of water and wine, an armorer’s forge and anvil, a horse, a grindstone, furniture and baggage belonging to the officers and civilian passengers. Large coils of thick anchor cable lay on the gun deck, obstructing access to the guns and storerooms—the officers had assumed there would be time to transfer them to the cable tier once the ship was at sea. Thirty-two of the frigate’s crew were on the sick list, and by order of the surgeon their hammocks had been strung between the guns on the spar deck, where they could take in the sun and fresh air. Chesapeake’s guns were loaded and shotted, but most had been securely lashed up in case of heavy weather during the Atlantic crossing.
No one denied that all this clutter was unseamanlike. But the United States was at peace with the entire world, and neither Barron nor any of his officers, passengers, or crew had any reason to expect a hostile encounter between the Capes of Virginia and the Straits of Gibraltar. Even in the Mediterranean, none of the Barbary States had shown an antagonistic tendency since the end of the Tripolitan War two years earlier. It seemed essential to get the much-delayed frigate underway at last, and to make a safe and comfortable Atlantic crossing. Once they had reached the Mediterranean, the provisions and stores could be landed on shore, the passengers disembarked, and everything made taut in man-of-war fashion. Until then, no one seemed to give the Chesapeake’s readiness for action a second thought.
At 9:00 a.m., Chesapeake passed by the British squadron at Lynnhaven Bay. Through his telescope, James Barron observed the 74-gun Bellona making signals to the other ships of the squadron, but he was unable to read them and thought nothing of them. Chesapeake doubled Cape Henry and steered into the offing, dead east on the compass. At noon, with the lighthouse bearing southwest by south, the hands were put to unbending the larboard anchor cable, stowing the anchor, and “clearing Ship for Sea.”
The Leopard had put to sea just ahead of the Chesapeake. Several of the American officers found her maneuvering peculiar. She had “hauled by the wind, close around Cape Henry, and stood to the Southward, under easy sail, thereby showing that it was not her intention to get off the land speedily.” If Leopard did not intend to sail away from the coast, why was she sailing at all? And why at that particular moment? But the English frigate’s maneuvers, quixotic as they were, did not arouse Barron’s suspicions.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, when the Leopard was three or four miles away to the south, she wore round and stood northward, directly toward the Chesapeake. As she closed the distance, several of the Chesapeake’s officers noticed that her lower deck gunports were open and the tompions had been taken out of her guns. It seemed likely she was cleared for action. But Barron later testified that he still did not assume there was any cause for concern. It was possible that the Leopard merely intended to ask the Americans to carry dispatches to Europe, a courtesy frequently extended between vessels at sea.
At 3:30 p.m., the Leopard came within hailing distance. Her captain, Salusbury Pryce Humphreys, hailed Barron across the water and asked permission to send an officer, with dispatches, to go aboard the Chesapeake. Barron, through a speaking trumpet, answered that he would heave to and await the Leopard’s boat, and he had Chesapeake’s main topsail thrown aback to take the way off her.
The Leopard’s boat was lowered and rowed across to the Chesapeake, and Lieutenant John Meade came aboard. Meade handed Commodore Barron a copy of Admiral Berkeley’s circular order. The last clause—“according to the Customs and usage of civilized nations on terms of peace and Amity with each other”—might have been considered by the Americans as a bad joke, but it was clear from the young lieutenant’s grave demeanor that the English were serious. The Leopard intended to muster the Chesapeake’s crew as she would muster the crew of any common merchantman.
Lieutenant Meade remained aboard the Chesapeake for about forty minutes, and then returned to the Leopard with a note from Commodore Barron to Captain Humphreys. Barron wrote that he did not know of any such man as the circular described, and added, “I am also instructed never to permit the crew of any ship that I command to be mustered by any other but their own officers. It is my disposition to preserve harmony, and I hope this answer to your dispatch will prove satisfactory.”
As the British lieutenant was being rowed back to the Leopard, Barron observed that “their intentions appear serious” and ordered Captain Gordon to send the crew to quarters. The commodore specified that it be done silently, so as not to provoke the British to a preemptive strike. In the confusion that followed, the drummer began tapping out the traditional roll to bring the men to quarters. Gordon silenced him by knocking him down with the flat of his sword. The truncated drum roll sent the crew into confusion: some assumed that the order to clear for action had been countermanded, and froze.
Nothing was ready; nothing was organized; chaos reigned aboard the Chesapeake. Not a single gun was primed and ready to be fired. There were no powder horns on the gun deck, no matches in the match tubs, and not enough rammers, sponges, and handspikes to serve a full broadside. Sick men were still lying in hammocks slung between the spar deck guns. Coils of anchor cable, the armorer’s forge, casks, ladders, furniture, lumber, baggage, and various other articles obstructed the lanes leading fore and aft on the gun deck. Orders were shouted and countermanded; men rushed back and forth; and precious minutes continued to slip away.
Captain Humphreys knew perfectly well that the Chesapeake was unprepared, and had no intention of giving the Americans time to sort themselves out. He shouted across the water: “Commodore Barron, you must be aware of the necessity I am under of complying with the orders of my commander-in-chief!” Barron played for time, shouting: “I do not understand what you say!”—and then urged Gordon to “hurry” and get the ship ready for action.
Leopard fired a warning shot across Chesapeake’s bow. Barron ignored it.
At 4:30 p.m., the Leopard opened fire on the Chesapeake from pistol-shot range. Most of the balls struck Chesapeake amidships, creating secondary explosions of splinters on the interior walls of the bulwarks and gun deck. A few crashed through the rigging, sending down a rain of cordage and fragments of spars. Among the wounded was Commodore Barron himself, who received a splinter in his right thigh. With no priming powder on hand, none of the Chesapeake’s guns could be fired in response. The gunner was below, in the magazine, fumbling with the cartridges and powder horns.
On the quarterdeck, Commodore Barron clambered onto a signal locker and attempted to hail the Leopard, shouting that he would send his boat on board the English ship to discuss the issue of the deserters. Captain Humphreys, assuming his adversary was attempting to stall for more time, ignored these overtures.
Leopard�
�s guns erupted in a second broadside. More shot crashed into the Chesapeake, and splinters exploded in the faces of the men standing at the guns they could not fire. “For God’s sake, gentlemen,” cried Barron—“will nobody do his duty?” He turned to the sailing master and asked, “Is it possible we can’t get any guns to fire?” Recognizing the hopelessness of the Chesapeake’s situation, the commodore sent a junior officer forward to deliver a message to Captain Gordon: “For God’s sake, fire one gun for the honour of the flag. I mean to strike.”
A few of the Chesapeake’s 18-pounders were finally primed, but the loggerheads normally used to fire them were not yet heated. Lieutenant William Henry Allen retrieved a red-hot coal from the galley and touched it to the priming hole of one of the guns, causing it to fire. It was the only shot fired by the Chesapeake that day. Barron shouted down the hatchway: “Stop firing, stop firing. We have struck, we have struck.” At 4:45 p.m., while the American colors were actually on their way down from the mizzen peak, the Leopard fired a third broadside.
Three of the Chesapeake’s crew lay dead. Eighteen were wounded, ten seriously and eight slightly. One of the wounded men would later die.
Fifteen minutes after the last shot had been fired, two boats were lowered from the Leopard. They brought across two lieutenants and a party of seamen. The boarding party ordered the Chesapeake’s sailing master to produce the muster books and muster the crew. The English officers studied the faces of the Chesapeake’s men and identified three deserters. A fourth, Jenkin Ratford, was dragged out of the coal hole, where he had hidden at the end of the action. The four were taken back to the Leopard.
Commodore Barron retired to his cabin and wrote a quick note to Captain Humphreys: “Sir, I consider the Frigate Chesapeake as your prize, and am ready to deliver her to an Officer authorized to receive her. By the return of the boat I shall expect your answer.” A boat was lowered and Lieutenant Allen was rowed across to deliver the note. Half an hour later he returned with Captain Humphreys’s reply:
His majesty’s ship Leopard, At sea, June 22, 1807
Sir,
Having to the utmost of my power, fulfilled the instructions of my Commander in Chief, I have nothing more to desire; and must, in consequence, proceed to join the remainder of the Squadron; repeating that I am ready to give you every assistance in my power, and do most sincerely deplore that any lives should have been lost in the execution of a service which might have been adjusted more amicably, not only with respect to ourselves, but to the Nations to which we respectively belong.
I have the honour to remain, sir, your obedient humble servant,
S. P. Humphreys
A few minutes passed, and the Leopard hauled off for the Virginia Capes.
After a brief meeting with his officers, Barron decided that the Chesapeake must return to Norfolk. The hands were set to work repairing damage, splicing injured rigging, getting the anchors clear, and pumping three feet of water out of the hold. After darkness had fallen, Chesapeake got underway in the Leopard’s wake. At 8:00 a.m. on June 23, she entered the bay for which she was named, and passed the British squadron, where Leopard was anchored between Bellona and Melamphus. At half past noon, the disgraced American frigate let go of her anchor in Hampton Roads.
THE WAVE OF PUBLIC OUTRAGE raised by the Chesapeake-Leopard encounter was unlike any the American people had felt since the Revolution. Henry Adams identified it as the nation’s first “feeling of a true national emotion”—that is, the first to transcend the bitter rift dividing Federalists and Republicans. “The brand seethed and hissed like the glowing olive-stake of Ulysses in the Cyclops’ eye,” wrote Adams, “until the whole American people, like Cyclops, roared with pain and stood frantic on the shore, hurling abuse at their enemy, who taunted them from his safe ships.”
Minutes after the Chesapeake’s return to Hampton Roads, angry crowds gathered on the Norfolk and Portsmouth wharves. Even from a distance, an educated eye could study the frigate at her moorings and see she had been shot up. When one of Chesapeake’s boats brought eleven injured men to be landed at the hospital, the sight of the wounded transformed the crowd into a mob. They turned their collective fury against two hundred casks of fresh water recently purchased by the British squadron, smashing them to pieces.
Stephen Decatur and Samuel Barron went aboard Chesapeake at approximately 4:00 p.m. and remained for two hours. They found James Barron lying in his cabin, his leg wrapped in bloody bandages. By the appearance of the ship, Decatur concluded that the Chesapeake had been entirely unprepared to defend herself. He may have been influenced by conversations with the ship’s lieutenants. When Captain Gordon was dispatched to Washington to report the encounter, he carried with him a letter to Navy Secretary Smith, signed by all the Chesapeake’s lieutenants, recommending that Barron be court-martialed.
Writing to his father from the “Late USS Chesapeake,” Lieutenant Allen gave some idea of the depths of shame and anguish to which the frigate’s officers had sunk:
Oh! that some one of their murderous balls had deprived me of the power of recollection the moment our colors were struck—I could have greeted it, received it to my bosom, with a kindred smile—nothing could equal so horrible a scene as it was, to see so many brave man standing to their Quarters among the blood of their butchered and wounded countrymen and hear their cries without the means of avenging them…. My God is it possible? My country’s flag disgraced. You cannot appreciate, you cannot conceive of my feeling at this moment…to be so mortified, humbled—cut to the soul. Yes, to have the finger of scorn pointing me out as one of the Chesapeake.
A public meeting was called at Norfolk’s town hall. The building proved too small to accommodate the crowds, and the meeting was relocated to Christ Church. A resolution moved that all commerce and communication with the British squadron should be prohibited. Another proposed that all citizens wear mourning clothes for ten days, in honor of the Chesapeake’s martyrs. The smashing of the water casks was endorsed as “highly laudable and praiseworthy.” The governor was urged to call out the militia, and Commodore Decatur was asked to put Norfolk’s gunboats into service. The Gazette and Public Ledger noted that war with England would be devastating to America, and to Norfolk in particular, but added, “we look upon it as degrading beneath contempt if we are to submit to such an insult.”
On June 27, one of the Chesapeake’s casualties, Robert MacDonald, died of his wounds in the hospital at Portsmouth. A boat brought his body across the river to Norfolk. Vessels in the harbor flew their colors at half-mast, and a salute was fired by the shore battery. A crowd estimated at four thousand turned out for the funeral procession, which began at Market Square, proceeded up Catherine Street, turned on Freemason Street, and terminated at Christ Church. The casket was carried by pallbearers chosen from among the captains of merchant vessels at anchor in the harbor. The Chesapeake’s officers and crew joined the solemn, angry procession.
Dark rumors intensified the sense of imminent danger. There were reports (later proved false) that a party of Royal Marines was moving to take Norfolk from the undefended inland side. Boatloads of British attackers were expected to advance up the river at any hour. Militiamen poured into the streets of Norfolk—the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, the Petersburg Republican Blues, the cavalry. The young men of the city met at the Exchange Coffee House and resolved to place themselves under Decatur’s command. Slave gangs worked to repair Fort Norfolk and fill powder cartridges for her newly mounted 18-pounder guns. Sailors from the Chesapeake worked to rig and arm the gunboats.
On June 29, a town ordinance prohibited contact between residents of Norfolk and the British squadron at Lynnhaven Bay. British commodore John E. Douglas had not previously threatened the town, but he now wrote Norfolk mayor Richard E. Lee to demand that the law be “immediately annulled.”
You must be perfectly aware that the British flag never has been, nor will be, insulted with impunity. You must also be aware that it has been
, and still is, in my power to obstruct the whole trade of the Chesapeake since the late circumstance…. Agreeably to my intentions, I have proceeded to Hampton Roads, with the squadron under my command, to await your answer, which I trust you will favor me with without delay.
As if to underscore his sincerity, the British squadron interdicted all outbound merchant traffic. British boats were sent to take soundings in the lower Roads, which was taken as a signal that Douglas was preparing to advance with his battleships into the Elizabeth River for an attack on Norfolk itself.
News of Leopard’s attack on Chesapeake reached Washington the afternoon of June 25. Congress had adjourned in March, and two department heads—Treasury Secretary Gallatin and War Secretary Dearborn—had left for the summer. Jefferson had been preparing to saddle up for the four-day ride to Monticello, where he would remain until early autumn, as he did each year. (“I consider it as a trying experiment for a person from the mountains to pass the two bilious months on the tidewater,” he had written in 1801.) Deciding that the crisis required his entire cabinet to be present in the capital, Jefferson wrote Gallatin and Dearborn, asking that they hurry back “without a moment’s avoidable delay.”
On July 2, the president issued a proclamation ordering all British naval vessels “now within the harbors or waters of the U.S. immediately & without any delay to depart from the same.” If the British refused to comply, local officials were to prohibit any commerce or communication with them, and punish any citizen who supplied them with fresh water, provisions, or piloting services.
During the following weeks, the cabinet met almost daily to organize the national defenses. All gunboats in commission were ordered to rendezvous at the points on the American coast where a direct attack was thought most likely. The Constitution and other vessels of the Mediterranean Squadron were ordered to sail for home. Jefferson asked Virginia governor William Cabell to call up the state militia and prepare for a possible British invasion of the tidewater region, including a thrust at Norfolk itself. Dispatches were sent to Ambassador Monroe in London, instructing him to demand an immediate disavowal of the action as well as the recall of Admiral Berkeley and the return of the men taken from the Chesapeake. When Jefferson learned that the British had asked compensation for the water casks destroyed by the Norfolk mob, he said he was reminded of the man “who, having broke his cane over the head of another, demanded payment for his cane.”